


a misunderstanding like many others

by meliore



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Tony Stark, Misunderstandings, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 22:22:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16273562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meliore/pseuds/meliore
Summary: Tony meets The Winter Soldier and they have a mutual misunderstanding about who and what both of them are.While four years old Tony thinks The Soldier is as normal as someone can be, but in need of help, The Soldier -- who is on the run from HYDRA -- thinks that they're both doing the same thing, and decides to take Tony with him.





	a misunderstanding like many others

**Author's Note:**

> A random thing I wrote around 4am/5am.
> 
> Not rated because I didn't really knew how to rate it.
> 
> There is some implied/referenced bullying in this.
> 
> This is unrevised!

Mother told him to stay where he was, said she’d come back in twenty minutes and left him with a piece of what had once been a paper sheet, telling him to call the number written on it -- enter in a place or in a house, with permission, and call Jarvis, but run if the people around him are too weird -- if she didn’t came back.

And Tony was willing to obey her. Jarvis had already explained to him what he thought of as _The Theory Of Childhood_ , a theory that contained topics such as don't accept things from strangers, don’t talk to strangers, be obedient, behave, so Tony knew that he should stay right where he was. Danger will come in his direction if he doesn’t.

He was sitting in a bench, looking to people walking in the street. One of them captured his attention.

Well, it was not someone walking in the street itself, but behind the trees far away. Twenty-minutes are a long time, and his mother had just left him, and he could handle himself.

He wanted to explore.

To study that person.

So he did.

 _The subject is a man_ , he thought to himself, _his face is hidden and he does not seem to be in a healthy state._

The man held his rib and even though it was hard to spot him, he was awfully slow. Like the time Sean and his friends had played with Tony and he had to think about theories very quick, to study them even quicker and to put himself at risk of failure -- with the possibility the experiment would not be repeated because the risks of failing included death -- by walking away instead of hiding himself.

Maybe the man had a friend who was following him too.

Tony couldn’t see anyone next to them.

Well, Sean had left him alone after some time.

_The subject had disappeared and the experiment was canceled._

_Reason: the subject was not fun to play with anymore._

So maybe the man had a friend who had left him alone too. He walked, looking from the ground to the man, to be sure that he would not trip and that he was still following the man. They walked until they were not in a park anymore, until they were in an alley.

Tony realized he had no idea of where he was.

Well, he had, he was in an alley, but he had no idea how to come back to the place where his mother had left him. She gave him a number, and the piece of the paper sheet was in his pocket, and she told him to find a telephone.

“Are you okay, sir?” he asked.

The man, then, looked to him, quicker than Tony could say _methylenedioxymethamphetamine_. Though, in his defense, it was a big word.

He moved his hand from where it was placed in his rib. The movement seemed to be the one people typically did when they were reaching for something -- the man was reaching for something near his pocket, from what Tony could tell -- and it would be an interesting addition for his research to see what the man would do.

But unfortunate as it was, the man placed his hand on his rib again.

There was no proof that he was a man, thinking about it. Sure, his body frame was masculine, but walking in the town and not locked away in a big house, Tony saw women who had body frames like that. Actually, there was no proof the man was human.

Man and human or not, he was hurt.

“You don’t look fine, sir. Ma’am. I don’t know. Can I help you?” he tried to be polite as he could. A polite boy and a good boy are the same thing, and a good boy never has to be punished.

Tony realized he was breaking one of the main rules of the theory, then, thinking about the Dos and Don’ts of good children. A stranger is someone who is strange to you and who you are strange to. There is danger in the detail that your lack of knowledge about this person is mutual. Is Tony as dangerous to the person as the person is to Tony? That is an area he’d like to explore later.

As interesting as it is, right now, his priority has to be the person he followed. Was he running away from him? After all, he was a stranger to him.

He sat next to the person.

“If you’re afraid of me, you don’t have to be,” he told him, making his tone less loud to make a point. Tony felt afraid when people talked in loud tones around him, and Jarvis and his mother talked to him in quieter tones when he was crying or scared. And when he was alone, or when most adults were away from him, Tony did talk in louder tones. It made sense. “I won’t yell at you.”

The person stared at him. He supposed. There was no way he could know with the goggles the person used.

Was he blind? Or deaf? Or mute? Or he didn’t understood English? How good of a scientist is him if he failed to consider those possibilities?

“What are you doing here?” his voice was a muffled sound because of the mask he wore, but it was not a bad sound.

“You captured my attention and I noticed you were hurt,” Tony answered. Time to try and keep his tone neutral and not lie. When he lied, his mother and Jarvis got disappointed. Not to mention that it led to being smacked and his father’s shoes were so heavy, they hurt so much. “So I followed you.”

Now that the man had talked, Tony could hear his breath. He developed a theory. _The man is hurt and he is having trouble with breathing_.

“You shouldn’t be talking to me.”

“I am aware of that,” he had his words to offer, but if the man asked to Jarvis, he’d realize Tony had proof. “But you’re hurt.”

The man reached his mask -- and goggles -- and took them off.

He reminded Tony of his favorite superhero.

“I’ll be fine,” the man blinked and narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”

“Four,” he answered. “Five in May, next year.”

The man frowned, but then, shook his head, in an almost unnoticeable manner.

“Are you on the run?”

Tony considers the question for half a minute. He shrugs.

“I don’t know.”

The man snickers. It sounds very weird. Tony likes it.

“I get that feeling too.”

How long has he been here?

The man breathes, so deep, like he’s making an active research in his soul, or like he’s cleaning it. Tony has cleaned his room sometimes.

Despite being hurt, he stands up, and offers his hand to Tony.

Tony accepts it, and it’s surprisingly strong. While he expected an adult to have a firmer hand, this man has a _firm_ hand, like it’s made of a metal.

It’s gray and metallic. Maybe it is made of a metal.

“You have a name, brat?”

He frowns. He’s not a brat. But he does have a name.

“More than one.”

“Me too,” the man does not look like he’s feeling bad now. “You can call me Soldat. I’ll call you Widower.”

That’s not his name, he feels like pointing out, but the man seems…

More calm than he had been. A calm adult is something very important.

Soldat is a very cool name.

“You need to hold my hand or shit like that?”

“No,” shit is a bad word.

Soldat grins.

“Then we have nothing to wait for.”

He begins walking, and Tony follows him.

He has a feeling that somewhere in the distance, someone yelled his name.

Just like he appeared to him, almost unnoticeable, Soldat disappears, with the difference that this time he takes Tony with him.

**Author's Note:**

> Some context: Maria left Tony alone, but she genuinely was going to do something -- I don't know what -- and come back. She's used to Tony being very obedient when they're out and she left him with a number -- the number of Jarvis' telephone -- to be sure that if she was away for too long, or if something like Tony walking away or being kidnapped happened, he'd have a way to make someone know about it.
> 
> Tony gets curious easily and he's, like, a kid. A curious kid. So when he sees something abnormal -- like a weird dude dressed in a weird way and looking hurt -- he kind of wants to investigate it. It captures his attention and he forgets other things.
> 
> The Soldier has been running from HYDRA for some time, there. Maybe they found him or maybe he was hurt by a random person, but he was running away from them. Since he's used to many things -- one of them is children being trained to injure and murder people -- and Tony's approach was not childish to him, but weirdly pacific, he thought Tony and him were doing the same thing. And since Tony is four and his eyes seem innocent enough, he decides to take him.
> 
> The Soldier decides to call Tony 'Widower' because -- this might be wrong. If it is, then it's just how this particular AU is -- the Black Widow program, as far as I remember, is focused on training young girls. I thought that the connection they established because of a misunderstanding could be lost if Tony said his own name, and that was the only thing I could think about.
> 
> A random thought:
> 
> It's interesting that this has a different impact in all the characters involved. Like, for Tony it's an adventure, an experiment. For The Soldier, it might be a life he's saving, just by deciding to take this child with him. For Maria, it's scary, because she just lost her child and she has no idea where he is.


End file.
